GrantG

It is legal and useful in the neighborhood where the cars are made. This is a cultural thing in Germany - one cultural difference I am more than fine with...

subshooter

That's true. This is why torque is so much more important than HP. HP gives you the top end speed because you need power to overcome the increased air resistance at higher speed. As a side bar, this is also why the manual gives a higher top speed than the pdk. It's not because the pdk weighs more but it is because there is less power losses to the wheel in a manual leading to more useable HP.

Torque delivers the acceleration which is what most of us appreciate and actually recognize. Almost none of us are actually going to approach the top speed of the car.

As sad and controversial as it may sound, I think Porsche needs to put a Turbo in the GT3 instead of fecken back seats. I am addicted to the low end torque of a Turbo now and it still sounds ok. The torque in my C4 is about the same as a 992 GT3. I am going to be disappointed in the acceleration of my new purchase. I know I will.

GrantG

The car was not built for your local track. On the Nordschleife, it would make the lap very slow if you couldn't go over 150 mph. I went 181 mph in a 991 Turbo there (and I braked way too early)...

GrantG

You may be disappointed, but it's not just the torque at the flywheel that gives you the shove in the back. It's the torque at the wheels. Because the GT3 has a higher redline (by 20%), it can achieve the same speeds in gear as the C4 with 20% lower gearing. This would result in 20% more torque to the ground through torque multiplication from the gearing (this is why it's easier to do a burn-out in 1st as compared to 5th gear).

So, you may not be as disappointed as you fear (though it's far more important in the GT3 to be in the "right" gear than the C4)...

As an illustration, F1 cars used to use 2.4L NA V-8 engines in the 2000's. These only had ~200 ft-lbs of torque but a 20,000 rpm redline. So, they could absolutely melt the huge rear slicks due to torque multiplication in the extremely low 1st gear (3 times lower than a car with an average ~7k rpm redline) when they left the pits or did the standing-start at the beginning of the race...

CAlexio

Try driving in 992 turbo, it feels just like a Gt3 Except with massive torque... It's a very different car from the previous generation, frankly astonishing what they've done with it from the driving experience perspective.

GrantG

Needs a manual to feel like my GT3

Maybe there will be a new car that melds those dynamics with a manual (Sport Classic, perhaps?)

Yargk

I'll give you two completely opposite responses

First, on one level what you say makes sense. I've owned several turbo charged cars, from an old 930 to a civic type R. The civic is slower than my GT4, but because of the torque it certainly feels more lively when I'm in the wrong gear.

2nd, taken literally without context, what you wrote doesn't make any sense "Torque being more important than hp" is technically not even wrong. As a thought experiment, if I could design an engine that made the exact same hp curve as a 992 turbo engine, but at twice the rpm (what power the original makes at 2000 rpm mine makes at 4000 rpm, and so on up to a 13k or 14k rpm), it would have half the torque (by definition), but if you adjust the gears it would drive EXACTLY the same. So then from that standpoint torque by itself doesn't matter at all. The strictly correct version of what you're saying is a wide band of hp is what matters. When people say torque, they really mean hp at low rpm: the math of it comes out that for two engines with the same hp and the same redline, the one with more torque will have a wider hp band.

Also, torque is more important than hp where? On the race track, Honda S2000s are faster than a lot of cars that have double the torque. GT3s are faster than a lot of cars around a track that have 1.5x the torque. In this case, even a wide turbo hp band doesn't matter if the gearing is good enough to keep the rpms in a more narrow hp band. I'll guess what "torque matters" means is just that the car feels tractable at any rpm, understood.

Anyway, I appreciate turbos, but like normally aspirated for these track cars. Less heat and a linear response, with no turbo lag, is what I like.

If you're interested in the math, we all know Newton's f = m*a, right (force = mass*acceleration)? Well in this case it's
Fwheel = m*a (force at your wheels = m*a)
Fwheel = (rpmengine/rpmwheel)*torquecrank/radiuswheel
but rpmengine*torquecrank = hpcrank
So
acceleration = hpcrank/(rpmwheel*radiuswheel)
hp drives acceleration, not torque (I left out a constant or two, but the relationship is correct)

GrantG

Horsepower and Torque are totally dependent variables - you can't have more of one without more of the other at any particular rpm - it's just a matter of the torque curve's shape that determines different peak values and where they occur in the rev range...

The more torque an engine makes at a higher rpm, the more horsepower...

gravedgr

If you think sections of the Nurburgring or unrestricted autobahn qualify for defining "useful" to a typical car buyer, there's a gap in how we define realism that likely can't be crossed.

Edit - I didn't mean that to sound harsh. If you "useful" to use is being able to drive 150+, that's fine - I just meant I don't think many other would put that on their list of "useful" things the car can do.

GrantG

A typical car buyer shouldn't be shopping for a GT3

gravedgr

Maybe (see my edit above), but I would bet less than 2-3% of GT3 owners have ever seen north of 150 either.

Yargk

Exactly, I'll only add that with only a hp number, a road speed, and a mass, I could give you a good estimate of the acceleration. However, if you instead gave me torque, not hp, I'd have to know at what rpm as well. So from that perspective hp is the more meaningful number.

GrantG

Have you ever been to Germany, and if so, how about the Nurburgring? You'll see more of them than you can count doing it every day.

It's a fairly recent phenomenon that people buy the GT3 to drive around like a grandma or to show off at the cafe. The reason for their existence is right in the name (and it used to mean something).

Anyone who buys one of these without taking advantage of factory delivery is really missing out, imo.

Here's an older/slower one:

GrantG

Here's a 991.2:

GrantG

BTW, I am not one of those guys who buys a GT3 for its Vmax. My local track keeps me well under 150mph. But, I wouldn't have bought a new GT car (neither my GT4 nor my GT3) without the experience of Euro Delivery. Otherwise, I'm perfectly happy with my 1973 911 that is gearing limited to around 135 mph (although it would go around 160 with taller gears). Would never take that on the Nurburgring though...